THE 1968 'HUE MASSACRE' by D. Gareth Porter

"Indochina Chronicle," #33, June 24,
1974

Part One

Six years after the stunning communist Tet Offensive of
1968, one of the enduring myths of the Second Indochina War
remains essentially unchallenged: the communist "massacre" at
Hue. The official version of what happened in Hue has been that
the National Liberation Front (NLF) and the North Vietnamese
deliberately and systematically murdered not only responsible
officials but religious figures, the educated elite and ordinary
people, and that burial sites later found yielded some 3,000
bodies, the largest portion of the total of more than 4,700
victims of communist execution.

Although there is still much that is not known about what
happened in Hue, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that
the story conveyed to the American public by the South Vietnamese
and American propaganda agencies bore little resemblance to the
truth, but was, on the contrary, the result of a political
warfare campaign by the Saigon government, embellished by the
U.S. government and accepted uncritically by the U.S. press. A
careful study of the official story of the Hue "massacre" on the
one hand, and of the evidence from independent or anti-communist
sources on the other, provides a revealing glimpse into efforts
by the U.S. press to keep alive fears of a massive "bloodbath."1
It is a myth which has served the U.S. administration interests
well in the past, and continues to influence public attitudes
deeply today.

THE TENTH POLITICAL WARFARE BATTALION'S
ROLE

To unravel the official story of Hue, one must go back to
the source of the original information which was conveyed to the
American public about the episode.

The agency of the Saigon government given overall
responsibility for compiling data on the alleged "massacre" and
publicizing the information was neither the Ministry of Social
Welfare and Refugees nor the Ministry of Health, as one might
have expected, but the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion of the
Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN). It is on the word of this
body, whose specific mission is to discredit the National
Liberation Front without regard to the truth, that the story of
the "massacre" reported by the U.S. press in 1968 and 1969 was
based. Neither the number of bodies found nor the causes of death
were ever confirmed by independent sources. On the contrary, as
we shall see, evidence from independent sources challenges the
Tenth Political Warfare Battalion's version of the facts.

The official Saigon account of the alleged massacre surfaced
on April 23, 1968 when the Political Warfare Battalion released a
report that over one thousand people were executed by the
communists in and around Hue. The battalion's report was repeated
in detail by the United States Information Service but the U.S.
media ignored it.2 One week later the U.S. Mission released a
report of its own which was essentially a restatement of the ARVN
report. The U.S. Mission report was said to have been the result
of an investigation "by the United States and South Vietnamese
authorities."3 But the role of the U.S. advisors in the report
appears to have been secondary; according to the Saigon
government news agency, Vietnam Press, the report was based on
data supplied by the National Police in Hue, U.S. advisers,
interviews with South Vietnamese Information and Refugee
officials and "records of the Tenth Political Warfare Battalion,"
which supplied the basic statistics on the alleged executions.4
Vietnam Press further reported that "an officer of the Tenth
Political Warfare Battalion involved in investigating the
executions estimated that almost half of the victims were found
buried alive."

During the months of March and April, when the alleged
victims of communist execution were being uncovered, the Saigon
government did not allow any journalists to view the grave sites
or bodies, despite the fact that many foreign journalists were in
Hue at the time. Province Chief Col. Pham Van Khoa announced at
the end of February that 300 civilians government workers had
been executed by the communists and had been found in common
graves southeast of the city.5 But no journalist was ever taken
to see the alleged graves. In fact, French photographer Marc
Riboud, who demanded several times to see the graves, was
repeatedly refused permission. When he was finally taken in a
helicopter to travel to the alleged site the pilot refused to
land, claiming that the area was "insecure."6 Riboud never saw
the site , and when the official chronology of discoveries and
map coordinates of the grave sites were finally released, there
was no site resembling the one described by Co. Khoa.7

Stewart Harris of the _London Times_ was in Hue to do a
story on the alleged mass executions in late March, just at the
time when, according to the official chronology, some 400 bodies
were being uncovered in the area of the imperial tombs south of
Hue. But instead of taking him to that site, the American
political warfare officer took Harris to a village where there no
mass graves, while the Vietnamese political warfare officer took
him to a grave site in Gia Hoi district, where the bodies had
long since been reburied.8 So he had to depend on the word of the
Vietnamese and American officials concerning what was to be found
at the grave sites.

Moreover, ARVN'S Political Warfare Department issued
contradictory reports on how many bodies were actually uncovered.
At the Gia Hoi High School sites, for example, the official
American report, based on information furnished by the Tenth
Political Warfare Battalion, gave a total of 22 mass graves and
200 bodies, for an average of nine bodies per grave.9 But when
Stewart Harris was taken to the site, he was told by his
Vietnamese escort officer that each of the 22 graves held from
three to seven bodies, which would have put the total somewhere
between 66 and 150.10 At about the same time, the Tenth Political
Warfare Battalion published a pamphlet for Vietnamese consumption
which said there were 14 graves at the high school instead of 22,
which would have reduced the total still further.11

A DOCTOR'S CONTRADICTORY
FINDINGS

The elusiveness of Saigon's figures is significant in the
view of the testimony of Alje Vennema, a doctor working for a
Canadian medical team at Quang Ngai hospital, who happened to be
in the Hue province hospital during the Tet Offensive and who
made his own investigation of the grave sites.12 Vennema agreed
that there were 14 graves at Gia Hoi High School but said there
was a total of only 20 bodies in those graves. Vennema also
stated that the other two sites in Gia Hoi district of Hue held
only 19 bodies rather than the 77 claimed by the government, and
that those in the area of the imperial tombs southwest of Hue
contained only 29 bodies rather than 201 as claimed in the
official report.

According to Vennema, therefore, the total number of bodies
at the four major sites discovered immediately after Tet was 68,
instead of the officially claimed total of 477. Then, too, while
he did not claim that none of these bodies was the victim of NLF
execution, he said that the evidence indicated most of them were
victims of fighting in the area, rather than of political
killings. In the case of the sites in the imperial tombs area, he
stated that most of the bodies were clothed in the threads of
uniforms. He reported having talked with nearby villagers who
said that from February 21 to 26 there had been heavy bombing,
shelling and strafing in the immediate area. And, in contrast to
the government claims that many victims had been buried alive
there, Vennema said all the bodies showed wounds.

The circumstances of the official version -- its political
warfare origins, the refusal to allow confirmation by the press
from first-hand observation, the questionable statistics -- and
the conflicting testimony of a medical doctor who was present at
the time all point to misrepresentation of the truth by the
Saigon government in its April 1968 report. In fact, the evidence
suggests that the Political Warfare Battalion may have inflated
the number of actual executions by the NLF by a factor of ten or
more.

THE 1969 EXHUMATIONS

During 1969, as more bodies were uncovered in the villages
surrounding Hue, another phase of the Saigon government campaign
was launched by ARVN's political warfare officers. The first
bodies were found southeast of Hue, where digging was carried out
under the supervision of a "Committee for Search and Burial of
Communist Victims" headed by the district chief, Major Trung.
Again newsmen were not invited to watch the work while it was
going on, but were later summoned by Major Trung and told that
the Committee had found 135 bodies in Vinh Luu hamlet of Phu Da
village and 230 bodies in seven graves in Phu Xuan village.13

What the district chief did not tell the reporters was that
the entire area in which the grave sites were found southeast of
Hue had been a battleground for many weeks early in 1968. The NLF
continued to hold many of the hamlets even after being driven out
of the city, and some hamlets remained in their hands for months,
as American fighter-bombers carried out heavy strikes against
them.

One of the four sites discovered in late March 1969, which
allegedly contained 22 bodies, was between Phu My and Tuy Van
villages.14 Phy My village, only three miles east of Hue, was one
of the villages occupied by communist troops during the
offensive, when many young men of military age were drafted into
the Liberation Army. According to a later interview with one of
its inhabitants, American planes bombed the village repeatedly,
destroying hundreds of homes and killing civilians.

The three other burial sites, uncovered in late March and
early April, containing 357 bodies according to the Pentagon's
chronology of discoveries, were located in Phu Xuan village and a
short distance down the road in Phu Da village.15 Again, Phu
Xuan, 13 miles east of Hue, had been the scene of fierce
fighting, including the heavy use of American air power, in the
weeks after the offensive. In one all-day battle in which
American air strikes were called in, some 250 communist soldiers
were killed, according to an interview with the Phu Xuan village
chief published in the Political Warfare Department's own
newspaper, _Tien Tuyen_.16

The Saigon assertion that the bodies found were victims of
communist execution were not convincing even to officials of the
Saigon government. The Minister of Health, Tran Luu Y, after
visiting the burial sites in April 1969, frankly informed the
Thua Thien deputy province chief of his opinion that the bodies
could be those of NLF soldiers killed in battle.17 The Political
Warfare Department's newspaper promptly denounced the minister
for this skepticism.18

What little information was made available about the bodies
discovered certainly supported the suspicion that very few were
actually victims of communist execution. For one thing, Major
Trung's own report on the bodies found in his district claimed
only nine civil servants and 14 soldiers of the Saigon army out
of a total of 365.19 It was well known that a considerable number
of the bodies were those of women and children. An American
officer in Hue admitted to a _Washington Post_ reporter at a mass
funeral for the dead, "Some may have just gotten caught up [in
the fighting]."20 It would not be surprising indeed if the NLF
had not buried many women and children killed by airstrikes or
artillery fire in the hamlets which they controlled near Hue.

Another major discovery of bodies at Da Mai Creek, a heavily
wooded area ten miles south of Hue, in September 1969 remains
shrouded in vagueness and contradictions. Even the number of
bodies found remains something of a mystery. The official
Pentagon account of the discovery shows that the number was
approximately 250.21 But when Douglas Pike, the U.S. Information
Agency's Vietnam specialist, reported the find a few months
later, the figure had grown to 428.22

Moreover, the one "defector" produced by Saigon to testify
on this alleged communist massacre told two very different and
contradictory stories about the episode. In an interview arranged
by the Saigon government for the _Baltimore Sun_ late in 1969,
the "defector" testified that a communist district chief who had
been his friend had told him that nearly 600 people from Phu Cam
and Tu Dam were turned over to pro-communist hill tribesmen to be
murdered. The reason, he explained to the _Sun_, was that they
had been "traitors to the revolution."23 But this same man, in an
interview with the correspondent of _Tien Tuyen_ a few days later
said he had been told by the same district chief that 500
"tyrants" were being taken to the mountains, not to be killed but
to be reformed."24

Again, there is a major and direct conflict between Pike and
the official Pentagon version on who the victims were and where
they came from. Pike's version is that they were a group captured
in a church in the Catholic district of Phu Cam in Hue on
February 5, 1968 and marched five miles south, where 20 of them
were executed by a people's court and then turned over to a local
communist unit, which took them three and a half more miles away
from Hue before being murdered.25 But the Defense Department
account shows that the group of civilians taken from the church
in Phu Cam numbered only 80 to 100 people, not 400 as Pike
suggests.26 Moreover, an account originally published in the
semi-official _Viet-Nam Magazine_ and reprinted by the Saigon
Embassy in Washington, asserts that all except the 20 people
executed by the people's court were allowed to return to Hue with
the warning that the NLF would some day return to Hue, and that
the people should behave accordingly.27

These contradictions are important, given Pike's effort to
argue that the skeletons at Da Mai had to be the victims of
communist murder because they were a group which had been taken
from Hue as prisoners. In fact, there is evidence that most of
the people who left Phu Cam with the communists were not
prisoners at all, but were pressed into service as stretcher-
bearers, ammunition carriers, or even as soldiers for the NLF.28
As Agence France Presse reported from Hue during the battle for
the city, a number of young men, especially from the Phu Cam
area, received guns or were used as stretcher-bearers to
transport wounded soldiers toward the mountain camps.29

Again, circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that the
250 skeletons found at Da Mai Creek (not 400 as claimed by Pike)
were also killed in battle or by American B-52 strikes. The
_Viet-Nam Magazine_ article notes in passing that the site was
"in the vicinity where the communists fought their last big
battle with the allies (April 30 to May 2, 1968)"30 -- a fact of
which readers of the American press were never informed. The
People's Liberation Armed Forces have always made a point of
carrying as many of their war dead as possible from the
battlefield to be buried, in order to deny their enemy tactical
intelligence on casualties.

In short, the inconsistencies and other weaknesses of the
various official documents, the lack of confirming evidence, and
the evidence contradicting the official explanation all suggests
that the overwhelming majority of the bodies discovered in 1969
were in fact the victims of American air power and of the ground
fighting that raged in the hamlets, rather than NLF execution.

DOUGLAS PIKE: MEDIA
MANIPULATOR PAR EXCELLENCE

It was in large part due to the work of one man that the Hue
"massacre" received significant press coverage and wide comment
in 1969 and 1970. That man was U.S. Information Agency's Douglas
Pike. It was Pike who visited South Vietnam in November 1969,
apparently at the suggestion of Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, to
prepare a report on Hue.31

During the last two weeks of November, Pike inspired, either
directly or indirectly, several different newspaper articles on
both Hue and the "bloodbath" theme in general. Pike himself
briefed several reporters on his version of the communist
occupation of Hue and at the same time circulated a translation
of a captured communist document which he had found in the files
and which he argued was an open admission of the mass murder of
innocent civilians during the occupation of Hue.

The document was the subject of several stories in the
American press. The _Washington Post_, for example, carried the
Associated Press article on the document with the headline, "Reds
Killed 2900 in Hue during Tet, according to Seized Enemy
Document."32 The _Christian Science Monitor_ correspondent's
article, under the headline, "Communists Admit Murder," began,
"The Communist massacre in Hue in early 1968 represented the
culmination of careful planning."33 Both articles quoted as proof
of the "admission" the following sentence from the translation:
"We eliminated 1,892 administrative personnel, 39 policemen, 790
tyrants, 6 captains, 2 first lieutenants, 20 second lieutenants,
and many non-commissioned officers."

No reported questioned the authenticity of the document or
the accuracy of the translation they were given. Yet the original
Vietnamese document, a copy of which I obtained from the U.S.
Command in Vietnam in September, 1972, shows that the anonymous
author did not say what the press and public were led to believe
he said.34 In the original Vietnamese, the sentence quoted above
does not support the official U.S. line that the communists
admitted murdering more than 2,600 civilians in Hue. To begin
with, the context in which this sentence was written was not a
discussion of punishing those who were considered criminals or
"enemies," but an overall account of the offensive in destroying
the army and administration in Thua Thien. Two paragraphs
earlier, the document refers to the establishment of a "political
force whose mission was to propagandize and appeal for enemy
soldiers to surrender with their weapons." It recalls that self-
defense forces were so frightened when the Front's forces
attacked that they tried to cross the river, with the result that
21 of them drowned. The section dealing with Phu Vang district
notes the strength of the opposing forces and the locus of the
attack, claiming the seizure of 12 trucks to transport food and
60 rolls of cloth for flags.

It is the next sentence which reads, "We eliminate 1,892
administrative personnel" in the official translation. But the
word _diet_, translated as "eliminate" here, must be understood
to mean "destroy" or "neutralize" in a military sense, rather
than to "kill" or "liquidate," as Pike and the press reports
claimed. As used in communist military communiques, the term had
previously been used to include killed, wounded or captured among
enemy forces. For example, the Third Special Communique of the
People's Liberation Armed Forces, issued at the end of the Tet
Offensive, said, "We have destroyed [_diet_] a large part of the
enemy's force; according to initial statistics, we have killed,
wounded and captured more than 90,000 enemy...."35 It should be
noted that _diet_ does not mean to "kill" in any ordinary
Vietnamese usage, and that the official translation is highly
irregular.

Moreover, the word _te_, translated as "administrative
personnel" in the version circulated to newsmen, actually has the
broader meaning, according to a standard North Vietnamese
dictionary, of "puppet personnel," including both civilian _and_
military.36 When the document does refer specifically to the
Saigon government's administration, in fact, it uses a different
term, _nguy quyen_. Both the context and the normal usage of the
words in question, therefore, belie the meaning which Pike
successfully urged on the press.

PIKE'S 'ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE'
DOCUMENT

If the misrepresentation of the document may be explained by
a combination of bad translation and Pike's own zeal to find
evidence to support the official argument, Pike himself must take
sole responsibility for a second such case which occurred about
the same time. Pike gave to selected reporters a list of 15
categories of what he called -- and were called in the press --
"enemies of the people," which were said to be targeted by the
communists for liquidation. The list included two categories
which suggests that the communists were out to kill Catholic
leaders and landlords or capitalists in particular: "leading and
key members of religious organizations still superstitious" and
"members of the exploiting class." The document was given
prominence in articles in the _Los Angeles Times_ and _Washington
Daily News_ on alleged communist plans for a "bloodbath," and was
again mentioned in stories dealing with Pike's own pamphlet.37

But again, although the document may have been authentic,
the construction put on it was clearly deceptive. First of all,
the document itself said nothing about "enemies of the people"38
-- a phrase introduced by Pike himself and repeated by the press
as thought it were in the original. And second, it did not say or
imply that these 15 categories of people were to be punished,
much less liquidated, as Pike suggested to reporters and later
wrote in his own booklet on Hue.39

In fact, the document, which bore the title "Fifteen
Criteria for Investigation," was simply one local cadre's notion
of the kinds of people who should be watched.40 The categories of
people who were marked for repression by the NLF were quite
different from the ones on the list circulated by Pike, and
included neither the "leading and key members of religious
organizations" nor "members of the exploiting class." And Pike
should have been well aware of this, since a separate document
containing the categories of people to be punished was published
by the U.S. Mission in October 1967.41

Yet another element of the press offensive inspired by
Pike's presence in Saigon was the testimony of a "rallier," or
defector, from the NLF on the bloodbath issue. The technique of
displaying such defectors before press conferences had been used
on many occasions by Saigon's Political Warfare Department in
order to make a political point which could not otherwise be
convincingly documented. Although the most experienced reporters
in Saigon were always skeptical of statements made by defectors
put on display by Saigon, there were always journalists who were
fascinated by the idea of interviewing genuine ex-communists.
Thus, it was arranged for Le Xuan Chuyen, who claimed to have
been a lieutenant colonel in the Vietnam People's Army before
defecting in August 1966, to be interviewed by _Washington Daily
News_ and _Los Angeles Times_ correspondents in order to
publicize his views on communist plans for a postwar bloodbath.
Chuyen estimated that a communist "blood debt" list included some
five million South Vietnamese, of whom some 500,000 would be
killed.42

A brief note on Chuyen's background helps to put this
testimony in proper perspective. Even in his initial
interrogation, this self-proclaimed "lieutenant colonel" (a rank
his interrogators were inclined to question) exhibited a notable
sense of political opportunism.43 He lost no time in praising
Thieu and Ky as leaders who were"daring, patriotic and have a
strong sense of nationalism," and he volunteered his desire to
work for the Americans or the Saigon government even before he
was asked.44 Within a few months, Chuyen was nominated to be
director of the government's Chieu Hoi Center for Saigon -- a
position which was never mentioned in news accounts of his
statement on alleged communist policies.45

A second alleged high-ranking communist defector, Col. Tran
Van Dac, was actually Planning Adviser to the General Directorate
of Political Warfare of ARVN at the time and this hardly a
disinterested witness.46 His 1969 statement that there were three
million Vietnamese on the "blood debt" list continues to be
relied on by U.S. administrative apologists, including Sir Robert
Thompson and Pike himself.47

End of Part One.
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